Book Information: Engineer of Human Souls, the

Danny Smiricky is a Czech writer who fled his country in 1968 to find asylum in the sheltered world of Edenvale College in Toronto. His New World is an Eden that he sees with Old World eyes; he is touched and exasperated by its political innocence, wryly amused by the hilarious counter-revolutionary schemes of his fellow émigrés, tormented by the Soviet secret agents who dog his footsteps, and he succumbs to the determined flirtations of his prettiest student.

At the same time he is undone by memories… of a homeland as lost to him as his youth… of Nadia, the factory girl who was his first lover… of his career as girl-chaser and feckless hero of the Nazi occupation, and later under Stalin… a world of heroes, traitors and innocents.